The Left Column

(Politico) The AFL-CIO is endorsing Rep. Keith Ellison to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee on Thursday.

"Representative Ellison meets the high standard working people expect from leaders of our political parties, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. He is a proven leader who will focus on year-round grassroots organizing to deliver for working families across America. Under his leadership, the Democratic Party will embody the values that our members stand for every day."

(Raw Story) “You have to pay attention, you have to attend these briefings,” Moore said. “This is our country, this is our security, this is our safety. You’re horsing around with all this nonsense, and you’re not doing your No. 1 job. And the No. 1 job of the president is to make sure the country is safe.”

“I’m asking you to do your job,” Moore said. “For the sake of the people who may end up dead.”

His legend is other-worldly and now, in his 95th year, that’s where John Glenn has gone.

An authentic hero and genuine American icon, Glenn died this afternoon surrounded by family at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus after a remarkably healthy life spent almost from the cradle with Annie, his beloved wife of 73 years, who survives.

(TPM) Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey has changed his opinion on the incoming national security adviser, retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn, after reading his tweets.

“...I must admit,” McCaffrey said, “I’m now extremely uneasy about some of these tweets, which don’t sound so much as if they are political skullduggery, but instead border on being demented. So I think we need to look into this and sort our what’s going on here.”

“I think that we need to aggressively examine what was going on with Gen. Flynn and his son, dealing with these transparent, nearly demented tweets that were going out,” he continued. “I think it needs closer scrutiny.”

(Washington Post) Half an hour after Trump tweeted about Jones on Wednesday, the union leader's phone began to ring and kept ringing, he said. One voice asked: What kind of car do you drive? Another said: We’re coming for you.

“Nothing that says they’re gonna kill me, but, you know, you better keep your eye on your kids,” Jones said later on MSNBC. “We know what car you drive. Things along those lines.”

(Raw Story) White supremacists are continuing their call for a boycott of upcoming Star Wars film Rogue One, accusing the film’s producers of promoting multiculturalism and an “anti-white” agenda, forward.com reports.

“(((Star Wars))) Is Anti-White Social Engineering,” reads a Reddit post by GenFrancoPepe on the subreddit r/altright, including a gif showing the cast from the movie; according to the image, predominantly white characters fight with the oppressive Empire while an array of multicultural characters support the rebel fighters.

(WaPo) U.S. media organizations are locked into such a negative mind-set that they portrayed Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as equally pernicious and scurrilous pretenders to the presidency. That, at least, is the conclusion of a study by Thomas E. Patterson in the fourth of his series of studies on media coverage of the presidential campaign for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

“False equivalencies abound in today’s reporting,” writes Patterson. “When journalists can’t, or won’t, distinguish between allegations directed at the Trump Foundation and those directed at the Clinton Foundation, there’s something seriously amiss. And false equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans.”

(HuffPo) President-elect Donald Trump believes that American intelligence agencies were motivated by politics, and not hard evidence, when they determined earlier this year that Russian state-sponsored hackers were behind the theft and release of internal emails from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

“I don’t believe it. I don’t believe interfered,” Trump told Time magazine in his “Person of the Year” interview, released Wednesday.

“That became a laughing point, not a talking point,” he went on. “Any time I do something, they say ‘oh, Russia interfered.’”

2 hrs ago -
(CNN)Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Donald Trump's pick to be his national security adviser, claimed in an August radio interview that Arabic signs were present along the United States border with Mexico to guide potential state-sponsored terrori ... (CNN)

4 hrs ago - US man charged with 1978 killing of British couple
By Jocelyne ZABLIT (AFP) 4 hours ago.
A 75-year-old California man was charged with the chilling 1978 murder of a young British couple who had been sailing on his boat in the Caribbean Sea.
S ... (Digital Journal)

5 hrs ago - Check your pantries: Publix Super Markets has issued a voluntary recall for several store brand pancake and waffle mixes due to concerns they may be tainted with Salmonella.
The chain issued the recall Wednesday after learning from a supplier that m ... (The Florida Times-Union)

5 hrs ago - 9 hours ago
The funeral has been taking place in the Colombian capital, Bogota, of a seven-year-old girl from a poor family who was raped and killed on Sunday.
Yuliana Samboni's body - which showed signs of torture - was found in a luxury apar ... (BBC News)

6 hrs ago - December 9 at 2:58 AM
TOKYO A Japanese government panel says an estimate of the total costs to clean up the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant has doubled to nearly 22 trillion yen ($190 billion), with decommissioning costs expected to continue to ris ... (Associated Press)

6 hrs ago - The National Assembly motion passed by 234 votes to 56, meaning some members of Ms Park's ruling Saenuri party voted to impeach her.
Ms Park's authority now passes to Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn.
She has been embroiled in a political scandal that ... (BBC)

7 hrs ago -
Forecasters are sending chills down some spines with a prediction that much of the northern half of the United States could see frigid weather next week similar to life-threatening lows the polar vortex brought to parts of the country in 2014.
Ant ... (reuters)

10 hrs ago -
By: Zero Hedge Thursday, December 8, 2016 at 11:08 am
While the WaPo admitted, two weeks after its infamous hit piece on "fringe media" which it labelled as "Russian propaganda fake news", that its entire article was based on reporting that was ... (investingchannel.com)

12 hrs ago - Andrew Puzder, the St. Louis attorney who rose to become CEO of Carl's Jr. and now stands as Donald Trump's pick to be Secretary of Labor, was accused of abuse by his first wife in the 1980s with police twice summoned to the couple's home.
The alle ... (Riverfront Times)

14 hrs ago - President-elect Donald Trump is staying on as an executive producer of NBCs The New Celebrity Apprentice despite his impending responsibilities as leader of the free world, Variety reported on Thursday.
The popular program, which propelled the busin ... (Huffington Post)

14 hrs ago - Opioid deaths continued to surge in 2015, surpassing 30,000 for the first time in recent history, according to CDC data released Thursday.
That marks an increase of nearly 5,000 deaths from 2014. Deaths involving powerful synthetic opiates, like fen ... (Washington Post)

15 hrs ago - Early Trump campaign operatives angst about their future as the Republican establishment muscles its way in.
Theyve been with him from the beginning when no one believed he could win, and when the Republican Party establishment wanted absolutely no ... (Politico)

16 hrs ago - MOONACHIE Shortly after Giants fullback Nikita Whitlock recounted to The Record the feelings of disappointment and confusion that have emerged since his home was broken into on Tuesday night and defaced with several racially-charged epithets, local ... (NorthJersey.com)

18 hrs ago - There were no Nazi salutes this time, at least. But Richard Spencer, the white supremacist Trump supporter trying to make racism cool by rebranding it alt-right, gave another rabble-rousing speech on Tuesday night, this time at Texas A&M University.
... (The Intercept)

18 hrs ago -
His legend is other-worldly and now, in his 95th year, thats where John Glenn has gone.
An authentic hero and genuine American icon, Glenn died this afternoon surrounded by family at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus afte ... (The Columbus Dispatch)

19 hrs ago - For the first time, seaborne radiation from Japans Fukushima nuclear disaster has been detected on the West Coast of the United States.
Cesium-134, the so-called fingerprint of Fukushima, was measured in seawater samples taken from Tillamook Bay and ... (KGW/NBC)

19 hrs ago - The AFL-CIO is endorsing Rep. Keith Ellison to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee on Thursday.
"Representative Ellison meets the high standard working people expect from leaders of our political parties, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumk ... (Politico)

19 hrs ago - The tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur, including bones, soft tissue, and even feathers, has been found preserved in amber, according to a report published today in the journal Current Biology.
While individual dinosaur-era feathers have been fo ... (National Geographic)

19 hrs ago - The man accused of firing an assault rifle inside a Washington restaurant said he regrets how he handled the situation but refused to completely dismiss the false online claims involving a child sex ring that brought him there known as pizzagate.
I ... (CBS News)

19 hrs ago - Legislation expanding the 2012 U.S. Magnitsky human rights act from Russian citizens to cover abusers in any country passed the U.S. Senate on Thursday as part of an annual defense policy bill, leaving the landmark measure on the verge of becoming la ... (Reuters)

19 hrs ago - Dec. 8, 2016 2:06 PM ET
BOSTON (AP) A federally backed effort to stem the rise of homegrown extremists is underway in Massachusetts, nearly three years after the White House announced the initiative on the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon b ... (Associated Press)

19 hrs ago - 2 hours ago
The scale of the terrorism threat to the UK is "unprecedented", the new head of MI6 has said.
Alex Younger said UK intelligence and security services had disrupted 12 terrorist plots since June 2013.
He said many of the threats came fr ... (BBC)